WARNING: Trek purists, I've noticed, REALLY hate this show. Probably because it's the only modern Trek that hasn't continued to stuff its bum with tweed. But I digress.
In just a few quick sentences, Ensign Beckett Mariner sums up what I find most appealing about Paramount+'s slightly seasoned (in its second season) Star Trek Lower Decks.
While cleaning up leftovers of senior officers' away missions and cultural explorations, Mariner tells Tendi the following: "Every day isn’t gonna be some pristine exploratory adventure. Sometimes it’s work, and it sucks. Get used to it." While the prime crew of the USS Cerritos muddles through second contact missions and comically being forced to deal with increasingly militant Pakleds, the lower decks crew gets assigned grunt work after grunt work. It's dull. It's boring. And it occasionally involves getting pooped out by strange space creatures.
It's also fun.
And while the wackiness does penetrate to the lower decks, this crew's adventure doesn't always end on some grand philosophical high note; bums are stuffed with crew members quickly expelled, not tweed.
And while I love the TNG era this series pokes fun at, it's fun to see Star Trek enjoying being Star Trek again, rather than everything else in the modern Trek world, being some gritty reboot and supposed moralistic reflection on our own troubled times. We can enjoy Rutherford being unable to stop his bloated barrel body because we can't ever see that happening to us. And it's fun to see writers and actors taking the rater stiff Trek tropes and flipping them on their heads.
That this crew isn't preaching moral superiority at every turn is probably why the Trek geeks don't like it all that much. Fine. More for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment